Meta

Subscribe

Archive for September, 2011

That’s the view of many of America’s millionaires on Warren Buffett’s demand that the rich pay higher taxes. It’s one thing for an 80-year-old philanthropist-investor worth $39 billion to pay a higher tax rate. It’s quite another for a small businessperson just starting out who’s worth a few million.

“There is more of a difference between my financial position as a multi-millionaire and Buffett’s than there is between mine and a guy that makes minimum wage,” one reader told CNNMoney. “Why am I grouped with him and why does he feel he can speak for me?” According to data from Spectrem Group, just 24% of those making $1 million or more a year said that the most equitable tax is a “graduated tax in which those who make more money, pay more.” Nearly half of them supported a flat tax.

Historically, non-Muslims whose lands were seized by the jihad had three choices: conversion, dhimmitude, or death. Today, however, they have a fourth option largely unavailable to their forbears: quit their lands of origin—emigrate—the latest testimony to the nature of Islam.

A recent report indicates that unprecedented numbers of Copts, Egypt’s indigenous Christian population, are emigrating from their homeland in response to the so-called “Arab spring”….

On Sat., Oct. 1, new regulations from the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul go into effect on debit cards. Specifically, they impose price controls on “interchange fees,” the fees that banks and credit unions charge to retailers on debit card transactions.

The average interchange fee is about 44 cents. The new rules limit the fees to 21 to 24 cents.

“The costs of processing debit card transactions doesn’t go away because you limit the price,” said John Berlau, director of the Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute. “That shifts the costs to consumers.”

What? You mean that soaking a business actually winds up soaking its customers? But that’s not what we wanted! No fair!

Bank of America (BAC) just announced a $5 monthly fee for debit cards, starting early next year. BofA cited regulatory costs. Wells Fargo (WFC) and Chase (JPM) has experimented with $3 fees in some markets. Earlier in the year, SunTrust (STI) bank ended its debit card reward program.

Democrat meddling in the economy is the gift that keeps on giving. Not only has the economy reverted to that of the Age of Roosevelt, our banking practices are galloping back in time as well. What’s next, the revival of Glass-Steagall? Bank accounts with a 10-cent-a-check fee?

Even retailers may not get the full benefit they are expecting. According to one article, debit card processors can charge an additional fee when merchandise is returned, and that fee may not be covered by the regulations. Processors also may charge flat fees on transactions rather than a percentage-based fee, meaning retailers may pay more on small sales. Expect more processors to do that as the regulations take hold.

Oops. That old debbil Unintended Consequences is Lucy-with-a-football to the gubbmint’s Charlie Brown. I guess some people just never learn.

Forty-five permanent jobs? That puts the cost per permanent job at over $16 million, a figure that could employ perhaps a hundred people had the capital remained in the hands of the private sector that produced it. Whatever else these green-tech loans are, they certainly are not job-creation stimulus.

Oh, did you think that? Foolish mortal.

But that’s not the best part. As both Gateway Pundit and American Glob discover, one of SolarReserve’s “investment partners” is Pacific Corporate Group, through its Clean Energy and Technology Fund. And PCG’s executive director is Ron Pelosi — brother of Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Suddenly, this deal makes a lot more sense than spending $737 million for forty-five jobs.

This may not seem like it matters, but it does. We haven’t had a pro-life first lady in the post-Roe era. Every first lady since Lady Bird Johnson, Republican or Democrat, has been openly pro-choice. The last person the leader of the free world talks to before they go to bed matters.

Yes, that includes both Mrs. Bushes. Considering the number of black babies that have been murdered by Planned Parenthood in the last forty years, you would think that Michelle-ma-belle would be sensitive to this issue. But life in the Crust trumps skin color … except when it fits the Narrative.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he agrees with Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s recent statements on immigration and he believes former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s views on the same points are “wrong.”

Since Bloomberg is a Democrat who switched to being a RINO merely to make it easier to be elected mayor, this suggests to me that Perry is wrong — and Romney right — on those two issues. In any event, if I were Perry, the fact that Bloomberg likes my position on something is certainly a red flag that my position is probably wrong.

Not really news, but a useful reminder. This prevents job creation in two ways: Employers have less money to pay new employees because they’re supporting more and more unemployed people through the unemployment tax, and employers are more reluctant to hire new employees because it costs real money to get rid of them once they’re on board. These are also major reasons behind chronic high unemployment in Europe (coupled with the disincentive to go back to work when being paid not to work is always an alternative).

Last year, employers paid 27.8% more in state jobless taxes, said Doug Holmes, president, UWC Strategic Services on Unemployment & Workers’ Compensation, a business trade association.

“Unemployment taxes, which were a relatively low bottom-line cost in 2008, are now becoming a significant cost,” Holmes said. “It discourages companies from electing to hire new employees.”

But wait! There’s more!

This is the first time during this economic downturn that states have had to pay interest on their federal borrowing, which currently totals nearly $38 billion. The 2009 stimulus act waived interest payments for two years, giving both cash-strapped states and their employers some breathing room.

The problem with socialism, as Margaret Thatcher so famously pointed out, is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

For Margery Keskin, an executive at four construction-related companies in upstate New York, the extra $2,000 her companies had to shell out means less money goes to bonuses or profit sharing for her roughly 40 employees. And she will have to think twice before she hires anyone.

“We try not to hire because we will be socked by a bigger tax bill for unemployment insurance,” said Keskin.

Cutting regulation would be a good idea too. My example of this is raisin bread. You know, bread with raisins, cinnamon and sugar in it. In California evidently you have to have your bread as certified as having enough raisins in it to call it “raisin bread.” Otherwise, we might die of disappointment or something.

I love the sight ‘bigthink’, a repository for ideas so absurd that only intellectuals could believe them. This is one such foray.

Yesterday marked the day the Earth went into ecological debt.

Don’t you just love that phrase? ‘Ecological debt’. Sounds as if it ought to mean something, doesn’t it? Something profound. Something important.

Humans have already used a year’s worth of the planet’s productivity and natural resources.

Decided by who? Left undefined. But humans suck, so we know it’s true.

Dubbed ‘Earth Overshoot Day’ by the Global Footprint Network, the planet will be in ecological debt for the rest of the year.

And who are the ‘Global Footprint Network’? Never heard of ‘em. But that doesn’t matter. Humans suck, so we know they’re right.

Human’s depend on the Earth for everything from food to fuel and clothing, but since the 1970’s humans have been using more resources than a single planet provides, the Network says.

And yet we never seem to run out, do we? How does that work, exactly? Left unexplained. But humans suck, so we know it’s true.

To keep up our current usage rates we would need between 1.3 to 1.5 Earths.

For how long? And how accurate is the assumption that we would ‘keep up our current usage rates’, much less use the same amount of the same things, given that the period is unspecified? Left unexplained. But humans suck, so we know it’s true.

From rising food and fuel prices to climate change, we are suffering the consequences.

Well, that’s what happens, doesn’t it? As we run out of stuff, prices go up until we can’t afford it any more and people stop using it. Sort of a self-correcting problem, to anybody who knows anything about how markets work. But apparently these people are not in that number. Pity, that. Makes you wonder what else they don’t know.

The industrial economies of the world are unsustainable.

A popular concept, but never justified; just stated as if it were a fact, obvious to the most casual observer. But humans suck, so we know they’re right.

If everyone on the planet consumed energy the way an average American did, we would need five Earths to meet our energy needs.

But everyone on the planet doesn’t consume energy the way an average American does, nor are they likely to. So what, of anything, does this add to the discussion. Left unexplained. Also left unexplained is the fact that if everyone on the planet produced energy — and other goods and services — the way an average American does, it wouldn’t be a problem. But they obviously aren’t interested in things that will never be a problem; they want problems to abound, so that people will turn to them for solutions. Besides, humans and Americans suck, so we know they’re right.

And on and on and on. Further fisking of this drivel is left as an exercise for the reader.

If schoolyard bullying is a federal issue, then everything must be, right? But in the eyes of the Obama administration, everything is a federal issue.

The Obama administration has taken a keen interest in what otherwise has to be the most local of issues. Last year, Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali issued a “Dear Colleague” letter in which she threatened school districts that don’t do enough to prevent schoolyard bullying. The letter makes it clear that simply punishing bullies who harass others on account of their race, sex, national origin or disability is not enough. Schools must wipe out the culture of bullying.

No hair is too fine for statists not so insist on splitting it. After all, they know what’s best for us; did they not go to Harvard?

Try to imagine George Washington convening a conference on playground bullies. Just try. Or better yet Andrew Jackson. Or Teddy “Bully!” Roosevelt.

In fact, if you think about how little time most adults have spent actively learning accurate information about science and scientists, it’s a little amazing that more people aren’t equally confused.

And, sadly, many of those confused people wind up in politics and The Media … with results as you see them.

We graduate high school knowing that Issac Newton discovered gravity, the general anatomical location of our stomachs relative to our hearts, and what happens when a car travelling 30 miles per hour crashes into a brick wall. At some point, probably in grade school, somebody told us about the scientific method, but not how that actually plays out in the real world. We learn the basics. We memorize some charts.

And then we live our lives in a world where science is much more complicated, and constantly changing.

Indeed, a world in which an ignorant public lives under a constant cloud of nameless fear generated by professional hand-wringers whose livelihoods depend on scaring the daylights out of people who’d just rather go about their lives in peace. But unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be on the program.

Armed troops acting on behalf of a British carbon trading company backed by the World Bank burned houses to the ground and killed children to evict Ugandans from their homes in the name of seizing land to protect against “global warming,” a shocking illustration of how the climate change con is a barbarian form of neo-colonialism.

The evictions were ordered by New Forests Company, an outfit that seizes land in Africa to grow trees then sells the “carbon credits” on to transnational corporations. The company is backed by the World Bank and HSBC. Its Board of Directors includes HSBC Managing Director Sajjad Sabur, as well as other former Goldman Sachs investment bankers.

Somebody call AlGore. He’ll want to get in on this.

The New York Times twists and turns but eventually has to confess the truth:

But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.

The case twists around an emerging multibillion-dollar market trading carbon-credits under the Kyoto Protocol, which contains mechanisms for outsourcing environmental protection to developing nations.

The trial of Michael Jackson’s doctor for involuntary manslaughter. The new network TV season. (Why is it that Hollywood always resembles the birds on the telephone line, who all take off in the same direction when the first crow squawks “Mad Men”?) Doonesbury. New York Times op-ed columns; all of them.

One of the big problems with the left is that they are ad-hoc groupings of disparate interests whose only commonality is a hatred of civilization in general and America in particular. So, like the thieves that they are, they often fall out.

Supported by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr. Schlein and his research partner Günter C. Müller concocted an array of nectar poisons known as Attractive Toxic Sugar Baits that are easy to make, environmentally friendly and inexpensive.

In tests in Israel and in West Africa, the baits knocked down mosquito populations by 90 percent. Even better, they nearly eliminated older females, the most dangerous mosquitoes. (Only females bite humans, and only mosquitoes that have already picked up malaria, dengue or another disease from one human can inject it with their saliva into another human.)

My colleagues at Praxis Strategy Groupand I have looked over data for the period after the economy started to weaken in 2006. Using stats from EMSI, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we compared sectors by growth, and then by average salary.

Not surprisingly “recession-proof” fields such as health care and education expanded some 11% over the past five years. More inexplicably, given its role in detonating the Great Recession, the financial sector expanded some 10%.

Considering the number of government bailouts of firms ‘too big to fail’, it certainly doesn’t surprise me.

But the biggest growth by far has taken place in the mining, oil and natural gas industries, where jobs expanded by 60%, creating a total of 500,000 new jobs. While that number is not as large as those generated by health care or education, the quality of these jobs are far higher. The average job in conventional energy pays about $100,000 annually — about $20,000 more than finance or professional services pay. The wages are more than twice as high as those in either health or education.

President Obama’s claim that he pays a lower tax rate than a teacher making $50,000 a year isn’t true. A single taxpayer with $50,000 of income would have paid 11.9 percent in federal income taxes for 2010, while the Obamas paid more than twice that rate — 25.3 percent (and higher rates than that in 2009 and 2008). And if the $50,000-a-year teacher were in Obama’s tax situation — supporting a spouse and two children — he or she would have paid no federal income taxes at all.

So either he’s a liar or he’s stupid. Since he went to Harvard, I call it ‘stupid’, but it could go either way.

What FactCheck is referring to is one of the President’s latest talking points: on at least two occasions in the last few days he’s said “I shouldn’t be paying a lower effective rate than a teacher, or a firefighter, or a construction worker” and “Somebody who’s making $50,000 a year as a teacher shouldn’t be paying a higher effective tax rate than somebody like myself”: obviously, this is complete nonsense. It’s in fact at Elizabeth Warren-levels of nonsense* …but I am very surprised that the fact that the President’s spouting off said nonsense would apparently be a shocking revelation for, well, anyone.

Not really news, but a useful reminder of what a goober our electorate saddled us with in 2008.

“We know the Affordable Care Act is constitutional. We are confident the Supreme Court will agree,” said White House adviser Stephanie Cutter.

I think the rot set in once they started naming laws after talking points. I’m waiting for some Democrat to introduce the ‘I’m Really Awesome and So Can You Act’, which will be crammed with enough pork to make the Middle East jump off of the planet entirely and establish its own orbit around the Sun.

And it accelerated once Republicans hopped on the bandwagon. (Patriot Act? What the fuck is that supposed to indicate? It could be anything from encouraging people to say the Pledge of Allegiance to subsidizing Independence Day celebrations.) I think the Republican Party ought to change it’s name to the ‘We Can Be Just As Stupid As The Other Guys So There Party’, just on truth-in-advertising grounds.

Samer Allawi “offered to use his position as a reporter to promote Hamas interests,” and “traveled to Qatar and met with additional Al Jazeera reporters, who the Shin Bet said were Hamas operatives, and discussed the possibility of using their position to advance Hamas by criticizing the US military in Afghanistan.”

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

This is like somebody at CNN admitting to being a Communist: Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Waving the “bloody shirt” of racism has been the most reliable workhorse of Democratic politics for at least a generation. Remember the wall-to-wall coverage of the “epidemic” of black-church fires in the 1990s? Remember George W. Bush’s “insensitivity” regarding the ghastly lynching of James Byrd? The epidemic turned out to be imaginary and Bush was happy to sign the death warrant for one of Byrd’s murderers, but the tactic is too precious for Democrats to abandon.

This is especially surprising considering the that Democrat establishment in the south was responsible for not only the Jim Crows laws and official segregation but also the racist atrocities that occurred during the civil rights movement in the sixties. And yet today black people are so reliably Democrat that it might as well be tattooed on their foreheads at birth. This would be like Jews during the sixties being lockstep supporters of the Nazi Party. I know it’s politically incorrect these days to say ‘black people must be really really stupid’, but I don’t see any other explanation.

Yet another stinkbomb from a past that the ‘progressive movement’ seeks to throw down the Memory Hole.

Compassionate. Visionary. A champion of women and the poor.

That’s the reputation that Wallace Kuralt built as Mecklenburg County’s welfare director from 1945 to 1972. Today, the building where Charlotte’s poor come for help bears his name – a name made even more prominent when his newscaster son, Charles Kuralt, rose to fame.

But as architect of Mecklenburg’s program of eugenic sterilization – state-ordered surgery to stop the poor and disabled from bearing children – Kuralt helped write one of the most shameful chapters of North Carolina history.

The Charlotte Observer has obtained records sealed by the state that tell the stories of 403 Mecklenburg residents ordered sterilized by the N.C. Eugenics Board at the behest of Kuralt’s welfare department.

Starting with a fresh box of twenty-four Crayola crayons I measured each with an i1 pro spectrophotometer to create a set of spectral power distributions (SPD) of the reflected light. You may not know this, but a spectrophotometer is good for much more than creating screen and printer profiles—for instance, I can tell you with some precision the color of my tongue (and my dog’s).

By the time an undocumented [sic!] child makes it from first grade to graduating high school, taxpayers have already sunk over $100,000 into that child’s education. To pull the plug on those children because of the actions of their parents would be unfair, and would nullify the investment taxpayers have already made in the kid. …

So while they’re here, our state would be better off giving these kids the chance to make our country better, rather than sentencing them to a second-class existence.

Good grief. First, the fact that 12 years of American education costs over a hundred grand ought to be an outrage, not an initial down-payment: We spend more per pupil than any advanced nation other than Luxembourg, and at least the Luxembourgers have something to show for it.

Second, the idea that government spending is an “investment” as opposed to prudent budgeting for necessary responsibilities is a classic all-purpose leftist euphemism for statism without end that no conservative should have any truck with: Why, to end our “investment” in “these kids” after a mere 12 years is to “sentence” people to a “second-class existence”! (And incidentally, how many taxpayers willingly chose this particular investment for their portfolio?)

Third, if massive expansion of college education helps “make our country better”, why are we the Brokest Nation in History? In 1940, a majority of the US population had no more than a Grade Eight education. By 2008, 40 per cent of 18-24 year-olds were enrolled in college. Eighth Grade America built a great nation, won a global war and emerged as the planet’s economic superpower – until Eighteenth Grade America drove it off a cliff. Yet a supposed “conservative” says, oh, no, diverting 40 per cent of young adults into a desultory half-decade Bachelor’s in Complacency Studies isn’t enough: We so fetishize pseudo-credentialization we must extend it even to illegal aliens.

Why stop there? We’ve spent over 20 grand per capita in Afghanistan. Why “nullify” that “investment”? Why don’t we send every Afghan to Harvard? Maybe they can all become diversity officers and community organizers, and Recovery Summer will really be going gangbusters.

Any company with a national presence has to spend money on lobbying — nothing nefarious about that; it’s a simple matter of self-defense. As Microsoft found out back in the 1990s, if you don’t pay for lobbyists, you get screwed by the government on behalf of your business rivals, who do pay for lobbyists — hence the anti-trust litigation that never accomplished anything but wasted millions of taxpayer and company dollars. The lawyers got fat, though, which was apparently one of its objectives. Nobody in the tech sector ever forgets that lesson.

Jerry Pournelle is fond of saying that, when legislators can determine what gets bought and sold, the first thing to be bought and sold will be legislators. Willie Brown, out in California, had this down to an art when he was Speaker of the California state legislature — he would introduce some bullshit regulatory legislation that would effectively destroy a company’s business, then drop it when they saw the light and contributed to his political war chest.

As early as this week, the British-based Christian Solidarity Worldwide reports, Iran may execute Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani for refusing to recant his Christian faith.

The Pastor had been arrested in 2009 when he tried to register his church with authorities. His defense lawyer Mohammed Ali Dadkhah was himself sentenced in July to nine years imprisonment for “actions and propaganda against the Islamic regime.” He is now appealing.

As I have said many times in the context of many similar incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no reliable way to distinguish a peaceful Muslim from a jihadist. This is yet more fruit of the unwillingness to make even a cursory attempt to take that fact into account.

And every few weeks (the last time was August 4), I find the paragraph above in the archives and post it again.

And yet the dim bulbs in the intelligence community in Washington are busy making sure that none of their teaching materials offend terror-linked Islamic supremacist groups in the U.S. This is the fruit also of their witless useful idiocy and political correctness.

We are blessed to have many poignant movies about the Nazis and the atrocities committed in concentration camps. As the years tick by and those who lived through those unimaginable experiences slip between the pages of history, I thank God that history has been preserved in books and film.

In contrast, I find the lack of movies about East Germany (or any country behind the Iron Curtain for that matter) rather telling. It is not for absence of living witnesses or data. It is merely a lack of will to even touch the subject. When the president of the United States snubs the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, maybe it is best to just not go there. Encouraging Americans to think about the mind-boggling amount of resources required to maintain the socialist utopia might cause them to question the entire concept of socialism.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, two projects in Alaska were ridiculed as examples of pork-barrel spending. Each sought more than $200 million from Washington to build a bridge to a sparsely populated area with light traffic. In the end, neither received earmarked federal funding.

But the Knik Arm Bridge and Toll Authority, or KABATA — the group behind a bridge project that would link Anchorage to a peninsula nearby — is still wooing private investors and trying to pry loose a considerable amount of state financial backing. And more than $50 million it has spent on promotion has been federal money.

Although earmarks for the bridge were eliminated, some of the redirected federal money has still made its way to the bridge authority for research and promotion.

Once-peaceful Syrian protesters are increasingly taking up arms to fight a six-month military crackdown, frustrated that President Bashar Assad remains in control while more than 2,700 demonstrators are dead, analysts and witnesses say.

Guess this Kumbaya-hippie-peace-love-dope process doesn’t work against a government that isn’t a Craven Western Government. Gonna have to do this the old-fashioned way.

The growing signs of armed resistance may accelerate the cycle of violence gripping the country by giving the government a pretext to use even greater firepower against its opponents.

Yeah, looks as if they really need a pretext to take it to the next level. Although it’s not clear what that ‘greater firepower’ might mean….

Authorities already have used tanks, snipers and mafialike gunmen known as “shabiha” who operate as hired guns for the regime.

What’s left? Nuclear weapons?

I can’t believe that people get paid for writing this stuff. I’m in the wrong line of work, obviously.

Government officials rushed $535 million to Solyndra because the Obama administration was determined to make the company the centerpiece of its green agenda regardless of the law of supply and demand. Billions more have been wasted by politicians betting on favored companies and making Washington bigger, using the brute force of government to force liberal preferences into the economy. Mr. Obama calls them “investments,” but this is really venture socialism.

All part of the same mindset: You, Ordinary Citizen, are too stupid to spend your money in the best way possible, so we’ll leave you a pittance to live on — if you’re lucky; we’d prefer that you live on government handouts — and let our Harvard-educated Whiz Kids spend it for you.

That’s what ‘socialism’ boils down to … they prate about The People but they actually mean The Government, and The Government means Right Thinking Folks like themselves.

Six years ago, Senate Finance Committee investigators mounted an inquiry into an exotic variety of nonprofit organization that they feared affluent families were using to warehouse wealth while simultaneously earning themselves lucrative tax breaks.

One nonprofit group singled out for scrutiny was a low-profile organization based in Tulsa. That group, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, later became the biggest investor in Solyndra, the solar company that collapsed last month after burning through a half-billion dollars in taxpayer money.

And this is why the ‘raise my taxes!’ meme is such bullshit. Beyond a certain level, being rich is not about having ready money but about having power, and power can be exercised through a tax-free foundation as readily (and sometimes more readily) than through a fat wallet — and the public relations benefits are far superior. ‘Do this or I won’t give you money’ uses after-tax dollars; ‘Do this or my foundation won’t give you money’ uses pre-tax dollars — and the power exercised is exactly the same.

Once again, the Democratic Party’s true nature as the Party of the Rich reveals itself.

Mr. Himes, 45, once benefited from his Wall Street past. His 12-year career at Goldman played well with voters near his Greenwich home during his first campaign in 2008, and he brought in more than $500,000 in donations from the securities and investments industry, nearly $150,000 of which came from individuals at Goldman.

With a neat side part, a sharp jaw and the trim physique of a former Harvard lightweight crew captain, Mr. Himes, a Rhodes Scholar who once modeled for Ralph Lauren, still looks every bit the financial executive. In 2002, he left Goldman to take a job at Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable housing nonprofit, where he stayed until running for office in 2008.

There’s no such thing as hospice for federal bureaucracies. No quiet corner where bureaus who have outlived their usefulness can go to bravely face the end. The undead need no such niceties; not when they can leap vampire-like upon the next great sector of American life and proceed to suck it dry in the name of “public interest,” “fair play,” or any other euphemistic glamour the Executive and Legislative branches can be lulled into…